Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial on money. How it

works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host,

David Stein. Today is episode 338. It's titled, Inflation, the National Debt, and US

Dollar. What could go wrong? I've done a lot of episodes on inflation, on the

National Debt, on how exchange rates work, the US Dollar, Central Banks. I keep going

back to these themes because there's some strange things going on, and these are important

concepts to understand and to link together as we guide our finances. There's a lot of

worries out there, and there's some conundrums. Like the fact that housing prices are up

double digits, yet inflation in the US is measured by the consumer price index is still

less than 3%. That the federal government is issuing trillions and trillions of dollars

of new government debt. Yet interest rates are rock bottom. That the money supply has

increased over 25% in the past year. There's money flowing everywhere, yet it's not showing

up in inflation measures, such as the consumer price index. In this episode, we're going

to connect those things together and consider what is it that could go wrong, where we could

see inflation spike and the return on treasury securities be negative. Last October, I released

an episode titled, How to Buy in a Hot Housing Market. I described LaPrile and I's quest

to sell our house in Phoenix and buy one in Tucson. Since then, the housing market has

gotten even hotter. The median existing home price in the US is up over 16% year-over-year.

The house we sold in Phoenix, Zillow estimates, is now worth 10% more than what we sold it

for this past November. Houses around the US are getting multiple offers, many above the

listing price, and often the buyer is paying cash.

One reason the housing market is so hot is individuals want to move. They have been working

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